IF you are a grown man in your 20s, 30s or 40s who wants to have sex with teenage girls aged 13 or 14, surely that means there is something wrong with you.

CREEPY Jimmy Savile leering out of photographs is the perfect bogeyman for a nation that lives in dread of paedophiles.

But the public’s relationship with the sexual adventures of celebrities has always been confused and uneasy.

Some of the most common lines swirling around the Savile scandal include: “Oh, the 70s and 80s was a very different time…more innocent.”

And: “If we knew then what we know now, he’d have been stopped.”

Would he? The furore has brought about a huge upturn in the fortunes of the phrase “hiding in plain sight”.

The expression reminds me very much of another celebrity repeatedly accused of child abuse – Michael Jackson.

We only need to look back to Jackson’s death in the summer of 2009 to see the Savile phenomenon exactly reversed.

Here was a man much investigated for sexual offences against children, a man who some LAPD officers are still absolutely convinced was an active predatory paedophile – but instead of being vilified upon his death, he was sanctified.

The papers were full of obituaries paying homage to Jackson’s (undoubtedly incredible) talent.

The chat shows were packed with talking heads queuing up to salute his greatness and glamour.

His records immediately shot to the top of the charts.

But no one said: “Hang on a minute, what about all this other stuff?”

You know, the stuff like Jordy Chandler, Jackson’s first accuser, giving detectives a detailed description of Jackson’s genital area, including distinctive “splotches”.

Stuff like Jackson then suddenly agreeing to settle Chandler’s civil claim out of court for somewhere north of $20million.

Michael Jackson

Stuff like Jackson telling the interviewer Martin Bashir in 2003 how he just liked to hang out with young boys, even having them sleep in his bed: “There’s nothing more loving you can do.” Apparently.

Stuff like Gavin Arvizo, then 13, accusing Jackson of giving him drink before molesting him.

Jackson was cleared of charges relating to Gavin after a four-month trial in 2005 and you can believe that the children who accused Jackson decided – in collusion with their money-grabbing parents – to take him to the cleaners.

Or you can, like me and most experts, believe that kids just don’t make this stuff up and that Jackson was an active child molester.

Now Jimmy Savile was not Michael Jackson. No one will much mourn the loss of whatever “talent” Savile laid claim to. Indeed, it’s difficult now to even connect the word with the DJ.

Long before the full horror of his private life had been revealed, he had come to be regarded as a figure of morbid fascination and revulsion.

But 30 years ago, he wasn’t.

He may never have had a fraction of Jackson’s charisma and talent but he would have cut an impossibly glamorous figure as he strode through the streets, through the hospitals, schools and other institutions he haunted.

Just before Jackson’s death, there was the furore around the film director Roman Polanski, who was arrested in Switzerland on charges of drugging and having sex with a 13-year-old girl 30 years ago.

Polanski fled the US in the 1970s to escape the charges and, in an interview with the writer Martin Amis in 1979, he’d railed against what he saw as the hypocrisy of the charges saying, “Everyone wants to f*** young girls!’

However – as Amis pointed out – not everyone does.

Not even when the young girls are apparently willing – as Polanski claimed his drowsy, drugged victim was – because young girls don’t really know whether they are willing or not.

And yet upon the 2009 arrest, many in Hollywood sided with Polanski, claiming it was all a long time ago and, hey, let’s forget about it because he’s a great director.

The Miramax film boss Harvey Weinstein even said Polanski was basically innocent and that we must “fix this terrible situation”.

Then there’s the likes of Jimmy Page, John Peel, Bill Wyman and Jonathan King – all adults known to have had sexual relationships with people not much into puberty.

But only one of them has ever faced any kind of public remonstration for their actions – King, who was jailed for seven years for sexual offences against boys aged 15 and 16.

There was much outcry about King in parts of the media and the music industry, with calls for him to be stripped of his BPI Man of the Year award and his gold discs.

There wasn’t much outcry against any of the others – presumably because none of the teenagers seduced by Page or Wyman complained.

Also, and we may detect a strand of homophobia here, all the others were heterosexual.

King was gay and a hard man to like – a man given to saying things like, “I was famous, I was extremely handsome, I was stunningly talented and that makes me very attractive.”

And everyone thinks King’s music was rubbish but we love Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones so let’s ignore the fact that Page’s girlfriend Lori Maddox was 14. And that Mandy Smith was only 13 when Wyman started “dating” her – younger than any of King’s victims.

If you’re a grown man in your 20s, 30s or 40s who wants to have sex with girls aged 13 or 14, then there’s something wrong with you.

But celebrities? Well, it seems to depend.

It depends if you’re a former DJ who has been giving everyone the creeps for years or if you’re a worldwide superstar, loved by millions since you were the tiniest member of the Jackson 5 belting out ABC.

“Michael,” one of Jackson’s managers is reported to have said to him at some point, “you have to stop all this stuff with the young boys.”

“I don’t want to,” Jackson replied.

In the light of the Savile case, it seems that “I don’t need to” would have been the more accurate answer.